I am passionate about the natural world, and photographing the various flora and fauna I see in my travels. Sometimes, conditions are not fantastic and as a result I need to use camera settings that are less than ideal for capturing these wonders, it could be that I need a specific shutter speed and as such I have to increase the ISO to a level that makes the image noisy, or other times I cant increase the shutter speed anymore.

This means that the images are not always optimal, but I go with the theory that its better to get something and try and fix it in post, than to come away with nothing at all.

How can the image be fixed in post though, well it depends on what is actually wrong with the image. I use a number of tools to fix images, for reducing noise I use Topaz DeNoise AI, and for increasing sharpness I use Topaz Sharpen AI. I also use a piece of software called Topaz Photo AI which combines the functions of both of these tools, and analyzes the image to determine what improvements are required (through their Autopilot technology).

In the below, I wanted to show the difference between two sets of images. The first set of images is a wide shot of a bird sitting on a fence which had to be taken using a higher shutter speed, the second set of photos is the same image but more tightly cropped to show the difference. In both cases the image was imported into Lightroom CC, and was edited in Topaz Photo AI as a TIFF in sRGB format, before being exported from Lightroom as a JPEG in sRGB, Resized to about 2000px on the long edge, and run through JPEGMini to resize images for the web.

As you can see with these images, there has been an improvement in the overall quality especially when considering noise reduction. Noise reduction can be a really hard thing to get right as it is trying to remove bad detail (noise) whilst retaining good detail which is seems to have largely got the balance right with here.